“I was approaching the French door (south side of residence) when a brown dog began to charge out at me from the south east part of the back yard. I attempted to place time and distance between the dog and myself by running backwards. The dog continued to aggressively run toward me to attack. This was exhibited by barking and growling. When the dog continued to attack toward me, I obtained my department issued Glock 9 mm model (Ser # LDR 247) from my holster and shot the dog 2 times effectively ending the imminent attack.”

It turned out, Cruse was responding to a false alarm that was somehow triggered, not much different than a false alarm he was responding to in 2002 when he ran a stop sign and struck a pick-up truck, killing a 61-year-old man named Leonard “Butch” Porter.

He ended up pleading guilty to vehicular homicide and was sentenced to a year in jail with 11 months suspended, serving only 30 days, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Eight months later, while Cruse was still on probation, an arbitrator ordered the department to rehire him, the Topeka Capital-Journalreported.

Still mourning the death of Josie, Harriette Macnish wondered how can a man with a conviction for vehicular homicide could still be employed as a cop.

And she will probably be surprised at how often cops kill dogs in this country.

While there is no official tally of how many dogs are killed by police, one organization, which was raising money to produce a documentary on the issue, estimated that cops kill one dog every 98 minutes.

And Laurel Matthews, a supervisory program specialist with the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (DOJ COPS) office – the same agency that will now train the Topeka Police Department – estimates that 25 to 30 pet dogs are killed each day by law enforcement officers, according to Police Mag.

And a website called PuppycideDB that provides a database to track these incidents estimates that “every year somewhere between several hundred to several thousand pets are killed by police.”